Vote Now: The Esquire Golden Age TV Seasons Bracket

Round 1 of our tournament commences

The NCAA Tournament is underway. Lannister anticipation is beginning to build as the fourth season premiere of HBO's Game of Thrones (set to air April 6) looms in the near-distance. Clearly there's only one way to handle the unique mix of emotions brought on by college basketball excitement and the promise of freshly intense King Joffrey loathing: vote in a March Madness-style bracket focused on dramas from the new millennium's golden age of television.

Vulture already published an exceptional Greatest TV Drama of the Past 25 Yearsbracket a couple of years ago, so we at Esquire decided to take a different approach. We've focused on specific seasons from the greatest TV dramas of the post-2000 era.

Obviously there may be some debate regarding which season constitutes a show's best. We could create a mini-bracket for The Sopranos alone and still fail to come up with an answer that feels definitive. So we selected seasons universally regarded as one of the stronger ones from each of 16 great dramas — Game of Thrones obviously included — and matched them up against each other. Readers will vote for their favorites through four rounds of grueling competition until, finally, a best TV drama season of the new millennium (so far) has been declared.

It won't be easy. But we are certain that, like the most memorable, morally compromised TV antiheroes, you will find a way to make the hard calls. Let's get started with round one. Voting for this round will close Monday, March 24 at 5 p.m. EST.

There's no denying that Steve Buscemi cuts an intimidating figure as Boardwalk Empire's Nucky Thompson, the bootlegging king of Atlantic City. But is he really a match for Tony Soprano, the suburban mafioso played by the late, unrelentingly great James Gandolfini? After all, if Tony had not arrived on television — and, in this third season of The Sopranos, had not continued to experience anxiety issues via himself and his own children — TV guys like Nucky might never have existed. The Sopranos season three is clearly the number-one seed here. It's up to Boardwalk fans to pull off an upset.

Raylan Givens in a cowboy hat vs. Rick Grimes in a sheriff's hat: Good God, just choosing between those two killer looks alone is practically impossible. Now try to decide which is better, the season of Justified that introduced us to mean moonshine mama Mags Benedict or the season of The Walking Dead that showed us Hershel Greene's farm and the Shane/Frank rivalry at its apex. Make up your mind, and do it quickly, before someone asks you to figure out where the hell Carl Grimes is.

It's the HBO fantasy series with all the nudity vs. the HBO Western with all the profanity. The third season of Game of Thrones was the biggest talker so far in the show's run, the one in which Jaime Lannister lost a hand, Tyrion Lannister took a wife, and the Red Wedding gushed with so much premium-cable blood that some viewers are still scraping their jaws off the floor a year after it first aired. As for the first season of Deadwood, it beautifully set up the stakes in a part-factual Western encampment so richly realized that we basically accept it as U.S. history, Shakespearean soliloquies and all. Game of Thrones undoubtedly has the larger fan base, but fans of Ian McShane as the whiskey-swilling, whore-mongering (literally), ranting Swearengen can be almost as passionate as the man they idolize. This could be a close one.

Both of these dramas brought sci-fi into the mainstream, one by focusing on the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, the other by zooming in on the survivors of a massive attack on humans by the Cylons. An Emmy for Best Drama followed that first season of Lost, which boasts perhaps the best pilot in TV history; a Peabody Award for Battlestar Galactica preceded its third season, which received wide critical acclaim. Bottom line: It's either John Locke or John Cavil for the win.

Tonally, Six Feet Under and Friday Night Lights are vastly different shows, yet both debuted with episodes that thrust lost directly into their audiences' faces — in Six Feet Under, via the collision that killed Fisher family patriarch Nathaniel, and in Friday Night Lights, with the debilitating injury of Jason Street. Each of these seasons includes some of the most moving episodes in these dramas' long history of making viewers verklempt. (That Six Feet Under finale montage! That FNL season-one moment when Tami tells Eric she's pregnant!) Just vote with clear eyes and Nate Fisher's sympathetic heart and you can't lose.

Arguably the greatest season of the greatest TV drama of all time, up against... the one great season of a series that has fallen off its mark in seasons two and three. Not a fair fight? Well, in our defense: Something had to be matched up against The Wire season four. And in Homeland's defense, season one was a pretty riveting, nerve-rattling look at two people — Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody — who were failed by systems in which they once placed great faith. One could say a variation of the same thing about that fourth season of The Wire, which shined a light on young people often failed by the Baltimore school system and, as always, the illegal systems at work on the streets. Will The Wire win? Uh, probably? But you tell us.

Finally, Don Draper, unscrupulous ad man, gets to match his lack of morality against Vic Mackey, unethical L.A. cop. The conflict between these two seasons can be summarized as the Mad Men in which the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce plan was born vs. The Shield in which the Strike Team plotted the Money Train heist. Other things happened in both seasons, of course — on Mad Men, there was the now famous office lawn mower accident and the reveal of Don's true identity to Betty; on The Shield, we got the presence of Armadillo Quintero and more firenecklacing than one typically sees in cable TV dramas. Both seasons represent not-always-admirable men, at their complicated, watchable best. Now you just have to decide which one of those bests is better.

It's the Bay Harbor Butcher vs. Heisenberg, serial killer vs. meth dealer, man responsible for many deaths vs ... another man responsible for many deaths. The pop cultural arc of these two shows traveled in opposing directions: Dexter started out strong and petered out in terms of acclaim by its eighth and final season, while Breaking Bad consistently picked up quality-and-buzz steam during its five seasons, going out with multiple, massive bangs when its final episode aired last year, just a week after Dexter's. These two particular seasons have something in common, though: Both make you think that the jig is up for their respective protagonists. But both protagonists prove that they will not go quietly into that good night.

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